Morris Gleitzman - Toad Heaven

Limpy stuck his head out of the grass. He felt his crook leg twitching and his warts tingling like they always did when he was excited. And scared.

I’ll be completely honest, this book is another example of me just not being able to say goodbye to a group of characters. It had happened before with human characters (Keith in Misery Guts etc and Rowena in Blabber Mouth etc) but never before with characters with this many warts.

This time it wasn’t just that I wanted to spend more time writing about characters with interesting skin characteristics and lovely personalities. There was something else. The more I thought about the problems faced by Limpy, Charm, Goliath and the other cane toads, the more I wanted to try and help them solve those problems.

And I thought I knew how to do it. If you’re facing violent attempts to kill you by a group of ruthless and powerful enemies (that’s us by the way), the obvious solution would be to find a place where that enemy can’t or doesn’t want to wipe you out. Simple, right?

UK cover

Specially when you discover there are places called national parks where all living creatures are protected.

Oh, if only things were actually that simple. And yet part of me doesn’t totally mean that. Because this is one of the difficult things about being an author. You want your characters to be safe and happy, but if they are, or rather if they are too early in the story, the story isn’t as interesting.

And so in Toad Heaven it turns out that national parks are places where almost all living creatures are protected …